


Pull Backs

by zlot



Category: British Actor RPF, British Comics RPF
Genre: First Kiss, M/M, Show Business
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2006-10-23
Updated: 2006-10-23
Packaged: 2017-10-06 15:54:18
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,625
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/55352
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/zlot/pseuds/zlot
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Oh God, he thinks, oh God, I'm the least sensitive man in Britain.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Pull Backs

Rik always likes working with Stephen (and Hugh by extension, of course, when you asked for one you generally got the other) because, for all their differences in style, they both know something about shocking people. Stephen can afford to be a bit more subtle about it; a simple "fuck" uttered in that tweedy voice can get a laugh. Rik has to go bigger and bigger, pulling faces and pretending to do unspeakably painful things to Ade’s genitals. But neither of them ever want to stop at the expected. Rik and Ade call it "the vomit laugh," when the sound gushes out at them, thick and chunky and raw. Comedy should always be somewhat painful, for the performers and the audience both.

"Mayall's Philosophy of Comedy," Ade yawns whenever Rik begins some discursive ranting nonsense on catharsis and bum jokes. Stephen did like it, on the occasions Rik told him, because he's a bit of a philosopher himself. "Or at least a wanker," Stephen would amend.

When Rik met Ade, as Rik reckons it, it was like meeting the perfect audience. This is why people fall in love: they want to spend their whole lives in the sunshine of that particular understanding and appreciation. Of course, it was obvious Ade was a lot funnier than him, so clearly they had to work together. Forever, preferably.

Stephen's more of a challenge. He represents everything Rik has set himself against, though probably not intentionally: Rik focuses on the crisp Oxbridge pronunciation and forgets the three months in Pucklechurch. Stephen could never start a revolution in comedy sounding so bloody BBC, nor would he make that his questionable goal. But Rik likes Stephen, admires his professionalism and elegance. He likes him best when he can get a vomit laugh out of him, because it proves somehow that sex and violence aren't just for the lowbrow audiences Rik and Ade deserve, according to their idiot critics.

\--

"Will there be another series of _The Young Ones_?" Stephen asks at dinner. It's 1984 and Rik is back in town, having disappeared into darkest Essex for a spell. Stephen is smoking his seventh cigarette of the evening, and wondering why he is counting.

"Just what I wanted to talk to you about. Yes. We’re going to start filming soon, and we'd like you and Hugh and Emma, if she'd like, to be in the first episode."

"Oh Lordy Lordikins. Doing what?"

"Actually you gave us the idea, Stephen. How'd you like to relive your University Challenge glory?"

Stephen leans back in his seat with a chuckle that's more of a smile, wondering how Rik maintains this energy, how his face can be so constantly animated when he's not consciously controlling it, why he insists on playing awful gits, hiding behind fake spots and pathetically lecherous faces. Of course he'll do it, do whatever, and he'll cajole Hugh and Emma into it if necessary, though he’s sure they’ll be only too anxious.

"I got this idea of, you know, some announcer saying, 'Rick, Scumbag,'" Rik goes on. "It's strange having a show about students who don't study, but they must go to a college with a name like Scumbag or something. And then a team of posh kids, of course. You'll have to have some awful snotty name, Stephen."

"Hmm, I think I see what you mean. Like Nigel Snotwell III? Julian Snot-Cressford? Lord Snot?"

Rik lets out the most marvelously high-pitched giggle at the final suggestion, before he can stop himself. Lord Snot it must perforce be.

Hugh and Emma will say yes, Stephen thinks, happy to be a part of the program that everyone is sure (the optimism of youth, partly) will go down in history, or would if what they all did actually Mattered. Rik thought it did, bless him, capital M and all, and were things otherwise, Stephen supposes, they wouldn’t get these charmingly ambitious projects.

\--

"The idea here," Rik says into the phone somewhat too loudly, "is that the Dangerous Brothers have been banned for being too, oh Jesus, too--"

"Dangerous?"

"Right, yeah, too violent, too sexy."

"I can attest to that," Stephen says, with a smile that's half smirk. It's 1986 now, and he is even busier these days, _Blackadder_ and all that. He hadn't seen Rik for months before he came to guest on the show. Now it appears that Rik is anxious not to let their communication slide again.

"Shut up, you pouf, so we're replaced by something safe, something audience-friendly, something...Fry and Laurie."

"But what do you want us to do? I'll overlook the insult implicit in your sudden invitation until you tell me."

"I don’t know, must I think of everything, just a few seconds of something horribly twee and boring. Surely you have something like that in your reper_toiiire_? I have to go, Stevie darling, but call and ask Hugh right away if he'll do it and we can put the rest together later." And Rik hangs up the phone, just like that.

Stephen hangs up too. Stevie?

The phone rings. It's

Rik. "How do people do that, just ring off without saying goodbye, in films? I felt oddly guilty. Goodbye, Stephen."

Luckily Hugh does have just the thing. "I was going through my notes yesterday to make sure we didn't inadvertently come up with something priceless," he says happily, "and I found this thing, one line, all it says is 'flower arranging dance.' I can't tell who wrote it, or what on earth he was thinking of, but I think it will be perfect for this nonsense."

They take it to the other boys, who love it, and the rest of the sketch emerges. Hugh, looking unusually cheerful all rehearsal, agrees to be hit by a chair. He doesn’t mind falling over, he’s quite good at it, whereas Stephen worries, Stephen always thinks it looks staged and pompous when he tries to fall. Stephen will talk instead. Why, he wonders, is it insulting when they don't want you to degrade yourself with some awful slapstick dick-grabs?

Rik does ask Stephen to demonstrate the Fry and Laurie notion of "sexy." On the spot, Stephen attempts an awkward hip gyration, pulling the back of his jacket up in a way he hopes is even remotely in the ballpark of being seductive. The bystanders on set are tittering, and even Hugh has stopped talking to Ade to laugh and say, "Just like that, please, on the night," but Rik clutches his heart only semi-theatrically, a very serious look on his face. "Hugh's a lucky man, Stevie," he says throatily, and Stephen laughs too, glad to be in on the joke, intensely thankful, for a moment, for the existence of Rik Mayall.

"What is this 'Stevie' business, young Rik?" he asks, and Rik grins. "If anyone needs a nickname, Stevie, it's you," he says.

  
\--

  
It’s 1995 and Simon Gray’s written a new play called _Cell Mates_ and wants Rik; he gets him, too, after some hedging. Rik is doing all he can to continue this new period in his career, Rik Mayall the Actor. He doesn't downgrade what he does with Ade, it's completely fucking brilliant and everyone must know it, but what if people think that the pimply pricks Rik plays are really what he’s like? He might as well try to shock in a new way.

Stephen expresses an interest and Alan Bates is bumped, to Rik's quiet satisfaction. Rik and Stephen, doing another play together: an odd couple for sure, both edging out of their respective marriage-like pairings to have an affair onstage. You can sell tickets to that sort of thing even if people aren't quite sure why they like it so much.

Rik digs it for that reason too, though he can’t put that fine a point on it himself. He likes that he can monopolize Stephen during and after rehearsals. It makes him realize how much he used to compete for Stephen's attention throughout all their collaborations.

"Your age-old crush on Fry continues," Ade had remarked when Rik told him about the new play, and perhaps it is something like that: more than one comedian has remarked on the warmth that comes with being in Stephen's favor, the pleasure of being specially noticed by the new National Treasure. And Stephen wouldn't be doing the play at all if he didn't like working with Rik, surely.

Everyone is full of optimism, and rehearsals are light-hearted and pass quickly. Stephen always knows his lines, and Rik forces himself to stop embroidering on Simon's words.

Ade is there opening night, and comes backstage afterward. "Hello, matey," he says seriously.

When he is excited (and doing stage things excites him), Rik tends towards hugging, so he mobs Ade as a matter of course. "How was it? Did Jennifer..." he trails off.

"Of course we both liked it. You're very good, for once," he says. "But I'm not sure how..." Rik waits, and eventually Ade continues: "Is anything wrong with Stephen?"

Rik doesn't think so, but it occurs to him to start watching.

The next night Stephen is pale and looks like he hasn't slept and wants to know if Rik has seen the reviews, which he hasn't, not really. Barbara read complimentary bits to him over lunch, as is their ritual when Rik starts a new project.

Stephen shows him (why on earth has he cut the bloody things out, Rik wonders), and Rik remembers to control his face and not wince. "Why on earth do you care?" he says. "Just wankers as usual."

"They're right this time, aren't they," Stephen says.

Rik launches into an entire song and dance centered around the word "no." _No, No, Of Course Not_, written, directed by and starring Rik Mayall, but it's no good. Stephen doesn't smile once.

The next night Stephen misses a couple of cues, trips over a few words. It's no more than Rik has done a thousand times, but this is Stephen Fry, and Rik knows instinctively that something bad is going to happen.

Rik always takes his time wiping off his pancake after a show, and things are quiet in the theater when he's ready to leave. By instinct, he knocks on Stephen's dressing room and is surprised to hear some muffled invitation to enter.

Stephen is leaning over the table, his head propped up by his fingertips, and Rik's sense of foreboding goes haywire. Stephen looks up, smiles wanly, says nothing.

Rik freezes in the doorway. (Oh God, he thinks, oh God, I'm the least sensitive man in Britain.) Should he tease Stephen out of it, or go for awkward pats on the shoulder? Or should he bluster something hearty-sounding and run for it? Jesus, if only he were Hugh, or anyone besides himself.

Before he can think of anything to say, Stephen speaks. "I don't think I can..." He clears his throat. "I think the jig may be up, as they say. For me."

"Erm," says Rik, helpfully.

Stephen continues, "I didn't enter this profession to fail. I don't know if I have the courage or the dignity to fail every single night for weeks."

"Stephen," Rik says. Stephen looks at him and sees immediately that he has no follow-up. "Stephen," he tries again. "Stevie."

"And to be so acutely aware of the failure, if I may split an infinitive. Surely there was a time when I wouldn't have cared. Perhaps you still don't, dear. But I'm so much older now than I used to be." A barked laugh. "I can't even talk normally right now."

"No, but you never have talked normally," Rik says quickly, and Stephen's mouth does twitch. Rik kneels by his chair and grasps Stephen's shoulder hard, and Stephen makes some involuntary, painful noise.

When Stephen leans down (he's so tall, Rik's mind repeats to itself, irrationally) and brushes Rik's lips with his own, Rik panics. He can feel his stupid face spasming with shock, and has just enough time to register the horror in Stephen's eyes. And then Rik has to leave the room, so he does.

He walks home and whispers every expletive he knows and a few he's invented. Why am I such a baby, he asks himself fiercely. He only misinterpreted, and anyway, we're good friends, and I should have stayed and made a joke and, I don't know, said something--anything--

The next day Stephen is gone.

\--

  
Stephen wanders streets he's seen once or twice before, on half-forgotten holidays. He's recognized from time to time in Belgium, but not approached much, thank God.

He doesn't think much about Rik; anyone who had stumbled into his dressing room that night, he muses, would have likely suffered the same fate, or so he thinks, though the memory of Rik's terror still has the power to provoke flashes of humiliation. That's all right. It's background. 

Every so often he does think about calling someone, Hugh perhaps, or even Simon Gray, who must be terribly upset. But he can't trust his voice. 

The more invested he became in success, the more open he was to shame, like this. Stephen remembers the pills, once upon a time in Norfolk, and wonders if it would have better had he succeeded that time.

  
\--

  
Simon is blindingly angry, and Rik is trying to just get through each show without going mad.

When the rumors start that Stephen has gone away to kill himself, Rik is so afraid and feels so guilty that his stomach tightens into a hard painful little ball. This is your fault, he tells himself about every four minutes.

The rumors do have the effect of making Simon worried instead of furious for a bit. "Rik, do you think--" he says one night, and Rik doesn't let him finish his sentence.

"He'd never bloody do it, not Stephen," Rik says vehemently, and sees that Simon is convinced. Rik is, after all, a good actor.

Late that night he takes a cordless phone into the bathroom with him and rings Ade. When he hears his voice down the line, Rik bursts into tears.

"Who is this?" Ade asks. "Surely not Rik Mayall, the hardest man in Europe?" Rik laughs wetly and fumbles for a tissue. "Is this about Fry?"

And Rik tells him everything, and when he's done, Ade says, "But he will come back all right, you know."

"I don't know,” Rik mumbles. "How do you?"

"Maybe he was due a breakdown. But he's got...I don't know, too many ties. Too many things to care about. You'll see."

Rik can't quite believe it until Stephen's statement comes through. The relief is immediate and immense; now he can be angry. He also gets an email the same day: only one sentence, and along the same lines.

_I'm so sorry._

  
\--

  
It's 1998 and Rik Mayall is almost dead.

Stephen hears about the accident on the news and thinks for a moment that it must be a joke. He calls Hugh, who doesn't know anything that wasn't in the papers, but gives him Jennifer and Adrian's phone number in Chagford.

"A quad bike, like they've been saying," Ade says flatly. "Flipped somehow, and he was underneath when Barbara found him. It's hard to say whether or not he'll have brain damage if he regains consciousness."

The _if_ hangs between Stephen and Ade for a moment.

"When," Ade says thickly. "When he regains consciousness. Sorry."

"It's all right," Stephen says, suddenly rendered uncomfortable by this trace of Adrian's grief. Another pause.

"You haven't seen Rik for a long time, have you?" Ade asks, and he hasn't, not really, only bumped into him. They made things up, Rik accepting Stephen's clumsy apologies before they got all the way out of his mouth, but unable to conceal entirely the betrayed look in his eyes. There's still too much unexplained between us, Stephen thinks hazily. And then: is that honestly the best reason I can give him not to die?

"No," Stephen says. "I haven't."

Ade sighs. "I think...I think he'll probably be all right, Stephen. I'll call you if I hear anything."

Stephen wishes Ade's voice wouldn't waver like that. He wonders if Rik has ever known this fear.

  
\--

Rik does live, and only loses his mind for a short while. There is joy again, joy in being alive, and then the crash into depression. He wants to cry when he looks at his children, when his friends call to ask after him.

What he does instead is write an email to Stephen Fry, who has not visited or called. But Rik thinks that he might get it, and so the words come pouring out, as fast as they can as he types with two fingers (he hates computers), his career is over, and by extension his life. His children will have to watch him lying on the couch until he finally does kick off. He can't spell out the question, which is hopefully implicit: how do you keep on?

Stephen writes back and quotes Brecht and is so totally, loftily, almost disgustingly Stephen about everything that Rik can't help laughing. But he is serious, at the end: "I suspect your doctors will soon tell you that what you feel is normal. But more importantly--and you must never tell anyone this if you wish to avoid a damn good thrashing, sir--I simply know, somehow, that you are not finished yet. Perhaps I grow superstitious in my old age. Please try to rein in your mockery until I see you again."

He signs it Stevie.

\--

  
It's 2004 and Rik is back in town to do an interview for something or other, so he calls Stephen and asks him to dinner. Rik can't drink now because of the epilepsy medication, and the glass of water looks incongruous sitting in front of him.

Last year Ade told some journalist that he was done working with Rik, before he managed to get around to telling Rik himself. It had hurt, of course: what did anyone expect?

Rik is a bit calmer since the accident, so rather than calling Ade unprintable names, he spoke to Barbara, who told him about how Ade had sobbed--that's the word she used--at Rik's side as he lay in the coma. "You can paint this however you want, as some big betrayal, I don't care," she told him, "but there's things that are business and things that are personal. I won't have you forget that he loves you, even if it's not his way to say it."

So Rik said little about the decision to Ade, but sent him a message through a newspaper. "I love Ade, full stop," he told the interviewer. And then it became a matter of waiting for things to become okay, as they usually do.

And now Hugh has gone to America with a new accent and a limp, and will no doubt be more famous soon than any of the old crowd, except Two-Oscars Emma. Rik feels for Stephen, and is thankful that Ade didn't put an ocean between them anyway.

Stephen's shattered pieces were all picked up years ago, and not by Rik. There is this Daniel now, not that Stephen ever wants to talk about him much, for fear of exposing something delicate to too much sunlight. Fry is stout and self-satisfied, and his Belgium silliness has been safely swept under the rug.

And Rik may be calmer in the main, but not about everything. He is mad to live, mad to work: he fears nothing more than irrelevancy. It is this chattering boy, graying at the temples, who sits opposite Stephen today, calling the waitress his "bird" so many times that Stephen is sure they will be thrown out. She only blushes. Charisma has not abandoned his friend yet.

Stephen just smiles, and smokes, and tries to feel like they're not two widowed pensioners on a park bench.

When Rik eventually begins to run out of steam, he asks Stephen if he misses Hugh yet. Stephen nods, and asks him if he misses Ade. "I haven't really gotten a chance," Rik says. "I still pop over and bother him all the fucking time."

"But you know what I mean."

Rik does. "I miss him, in that way. And will, until he agrees to write with me again. You don't know how hard it is for me to get things down without him, I have no idea whether I'm being funny or not."

Stephen knows about that too. He knows Hugh hasn't really broken up with him, as Emma put it the last time they talked ("How are you, my poor discarded darling?"), and that there's always a future. But he also understands how much validation we all truly require, and how hard it is to know that our presence is not always vital to the ones we love.

"Stevie," Rik says, and Stephen is still moderately surprised to be called that, even now. "Are we old now?"

"Oh yes."

"I suppose," he says brightly, "that should take some of the pressure off. Being in one's decline, and all that."

Stephen's fingers come to rest on Rik's hand for a moment, and Rik doesn't pull back.

"Someone's going to take a picture," Rik says, a grin starting, "and tomorrow's headline will be Rik Mayall Now A Shirt-Lifter."

"Surely not, if you continue displaying your rampant heterosexuality to our waitress, my sparrow."

And Rik giggles, and walks Stephen to his car, and this time it's Rik who kisses Stephen in a manner both apologetic and brash, and it's too much effort to be afraid now. How wonderful it is to still be alive, in the end.

**Author's Note:**

> Though I attribute a lot of details in this story to actual research--vomit laughs, details about Rik's accident and whatnot, even the nickname "Stevie"--later dippings into Rik interviews revealed several inaccuracies. The biggie, of course, is that Rik actually met Stephen when he first appeared on The Young Ones. I wrongly assumed that Rik would have invited Stephen and Co. himself, when it was Ben Elton instead. There is also a severe unlikelihood that Rik Mayall could have, then or now, received or sent an e-mail, even if he typed with two fingers or got help. The man hates computers. There's also some time confusion and the question of how pissed off Rik really was when Stephen fled to Belgium. But hey, I already wrote this thing and I can't do it again. Thank you for reading and, hopefully, enjoying.


End file.
